How God used the story of Anakin Skywalker to change a life.

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One of my favorite things about the Christmas season is being able to listen to Christmas music. I start listening to it the second that Thanksgiving is over, even before any Christmas decorations have gone up. I might also cheat a little bit and listen to some in October, mainly because I am not a huge fan of Halloween. This year among the Christmas classics like, “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night”, I heard a new song called “Red” by a Christian group called Shine Bright Baby (they’re all girls). The song is about the colors seen at Christmas time like silver and gold, or the different lights on a Christmas tree like yellow or green. The chorus is about the color that means the most, the color red.

The song describes the color has being the color of love, the promise of the blood (Jesus’ blood) and declaring the message that, “..heaven’s son is here to save.” The song speaks about focusing on Jesus’ birth as being the true meaning and the most important part of Christmas. “Red” should be the most important color, the one our eyes should be fixed on. The birth of Jesus is a source of great joy for those who believe. The Biblical story of the birth of Jesus is outlined in the book of Luke in chapter 2, one important element is the angels that come from heaven to deliver the good news to shepherds who were near by, Luke 2:10 says, “But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all people.” So Jesus equals joy.

The message of this song meant a great deal to the type of Christmas our family had this year, it was not necessarily a bad Christmas, just not a great one. We were visited by a lovely flu-like cold that caused our daughter to miss last couple of days of school before Christmas break. The sickness hit me pretty hard as well, messing up my plans to bake more than one type of cookie and do a craft a day with the kids to count down to Christmas. Our son got hit not once but twice, the second time hit on Christmas Eve and he coughed pretty much all night. This left him with little to no excitement on Christmas morning and asleep (yet still coughing) by Christmas afternoon. We had cancel our plans to have dinner with “Daddy’s work friends” as our daughter says and had Spinach Dip for Christmas dinner. Add to that a dash of homesickness and it was not the perfect Christmas most people imagine they will have on December 1st.

Thankfully, as the song displays, Christmas can not be ruined by sickness or missed dinners. Jesus was still born, we (my husband, daughter and son) were together, we may not have been healthy but, we were together. We got to play in the snow two days after Christmas, we watched all movies on our Christmas movie list and, read “The Night before Christmas” on Christmas Eve. We have a home, we had a tree and it had presents underneath. Plus another awesome thing about this time of year, the promise of a New Year. We rang in 2015, surrounded by friends and fireworks. When one looks at everything that went right and the absolute joy of Jesus, it was pretty awesome Christmas after all.

This also made me think more about the color red and what that might mean to Anakin. It was the color of his lightsaber when he was Darth Vader, and while that may not seem like a good thing, it meant very simply that he was alive. Anakin Skywalker could have died any number of ways, Palpatine could have killed him when he first arrived at the Jedi Temple as a little boy. He could died in any of the battles during the Clone Wars or Palpatine could have thrown him out of the same window that Mace Windu had just thrown through. Of course he very easily could have died during his battle with Obi-Wan on Mustafar, but he didn’t. Red was Anakin’s second chance, he was still alive to make a change, to finally live out his amazing calling. Anakin’s life was for certain not perfect, but there were many elements that worked together to create something pretty amazing in the end.

Red stands for promise, in the colors of Christmas it is Jesus coming into the world and becoming the least of these, to grant us a second chance (and third chance and forth chance).